Richard Eckersley, 65, Graphic Designer
Bill Schenley
FROM: The New York Times ~
By Steven Heller
Richard Eckersley, an award-winning graphic designer who introduced
unconventional typography to staid-looking university-press books,
died on Sunday at his home in Lincoln, Neb. He was 65.
The cause is not yet known, although he had been in failing health for
more than a year, said his son, Sam, a theater poster designer in New
York and a member of the third generation of Eckersleys to practice
graphic design.
The elder Mr. Eckersley had been the senior designer at the University
of Nebraska Press since 1981, producing hundreds of covers, jackets,
interior layouts and promotional posters for scholarly - often
abstract - books on modernist and postmodernist theory and criticism,
including Louis Aragon's "Treatise on Style."
Most of Mr. Eckersley's book designs, the design historian Roy R.
Behrens said in a 2002 Print Magazine article, "are characterized by
typographic subtlety and restraint."
A stickler for the finer points of spacing and arranging type, Mr.
Eckersley turned out work that was resolutely functional. Yet through
consistently meticulous compositions and a preference for bright, flat
color, matte paper and minimal ornament, he created a visual identity
for the University of Nebraska Press, which often received honors in
book shows and design competitions.
In 1989, however, Mr. Eckersley made a radical departure from his
signature restraint, shaking up the field with his design for Avital
Ronell's "Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech,"
an unorthodox study of Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger and the
philosophy of deconstruction. This was the first book Mr. Eckersley
designed on the computer, using new page-making software programs to
interpret the author's complex postmodern ideas typographically.
Although the stark black-and-white cover of this long vertical book
was rather quiet, he radically dislodged the interior text from
conventional settings, and the book's layout sometimes upstages the
text by deliberately impeding the act of reading, which is just what
Ms. Ronell wanted. Throughout the book there are unexplained gaps and
dislocations between sentences and paragraphs, forcing the reader to
work at reading. On one page is a mirror image of the page that faces
it. On another, snakelike trails of space that come from careless word
spacing (called rivers) are intentionally employed. Some words are
blurred to the point of being indecipherable; one line runs into
another because of the exaggerated use of negative line-spacing.
Though some adventurous graphic designers were experimenting at the
time with idiosyncratic computer type design, this was first attempt
to apply a "deconstructivist style" to a serious book.
Many of the same methods can be found earlier and later in Mr.
Eckersley's layouts for Derrida's "Glas" (1986) and its companion
volume "Glassary" (1986); and, to some extent, they are revisited in
his designs for Warren F. Motte Jr.'s "Questioning Edmond Jabčs"
(1990), Derrida's "Cinders" (1991), Blaise Cendrars's "Modernities and
Other Writings" (1992), Eyal Amiran and John Unsworth's "Essays in
Postmodern Culture" (1994), and L. C. Breunig's "Cubist Poets in
Paris" (1995).
Among his design games, Mr. Eckersley regularly toyed with routine
copyright pages by transforming them into typographic pictures
suggesting the contents of the books.
Richard Hilton Eckersley was born on Feb. 20, 1941, in Lancashire,
England. His father, Tom Eckersley, a celebrated poster designer
during World War II, was head of the graphic design department at the
London College of Printing. After attending Trinity College in Dublin,
where he studied English and Italian literature, Richard and his wife,
Dika, studied design. His brothers, Anthony and Paul, also became
graphic designers.
After graduating, Mr. Eckersley began his design career as a junior at
the London firm of Lund Humphries, the publisher of Typographica
magazine and the Penrose Annual, where he worked on books and
catalogs. Later he joined the state-sponsored Kilkenny Design
Workshops in Ireland. After six years there, he took a one-year
teaching position at the Tyler School of Art in Pennsylvania. In 1981
he started his job at the University of Nebraska Press.
Mr. Eckersley won the Carl Herzog Prize for book design in 1994; many
of his works were featured in exhibitions and museum collections,
including 11 examples of book design in the Cooper-Hewitt National
Design Museum in New York. In 1999 he was named royal designer for
industry by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts,
Manufactures and Commerce, an honor his father had won many years
earlier.
One of his larger projects at the University of Nebraska Press was the
13 volumes (completed over a span of 15 years) of "The Journals of the
Lewis and Clark Expedition." At his death he was working on "The
Collected Letters of Henry James."
In addition to his wife and son, he is survived by two daughters,
Nell, of Brooklyn, and Camilla, of Seattle.
His passion for books derived from Mr. Eckersley's paternal
grandfather, a Methodist minister, who restricted all activities but
reading on the Sabbath.
Mr. Eckersley once recalled that only after he had washed his hands
would the books be placed ceremoniously in front of him. "I was taught
to open the covers gently and to turn the pages by their top corners,"
he remembered. And throughout his career he cared for the printed page
as his grandfather had instructed.